The following are the top posts of 2011 on Fiction Notes.

1. Checklist of 17 Character Qualities
2. 43 Book Trailer Sites to Inspire, Instruct and Share
3. 15 Days to Stronger Characters
4. 29 Plot Templates: Know the Readers Expectations Before you Bust Them
5. How to Create Whacky, Interesting Character Descriptions that Stick with a Reader
6. Outline Level of Plot
7. 4 Goals for a Novel’s Opening Chapter
8. 30 Days to a Stronger Scene: Table of Contents
9. 30 Days to a Stronger Picture Book
10. 9 Traits of Sympathetic Characters
11. 9 Ways of Plotting a Novel
12. 15 Graphic Novel Resources: Read, Evaluate, Write, Illustrate, Submit

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Local PBS Feature

Coming August, 2011

Reviews of Prairie Storms

Home School Book Review

Macaroni Kid Torrance

Book Loons

4 the LOVE of BOOKS

Just Our Thoughts

Geography and OLIVER K. WOODMAN

You may also be interested in this just released resource:
Keep ‘em Reading: Finding Their Place, Students and Geography by Judith Snyder. The lesson plans include my book, The Journey of Oliver K. Woodman and Searching for Oliver K. Woodman.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Where will you be on January 27, 2012?
I’ll be in New York City, hoping that the weather is warm!

MARKETING FOR PROFESSIONAL WRITERS INTENSIVE DEBUTS AT THE 2012 SCBWI WINTER CONFERENCE

Registration opens today for the 13th Annual Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators International Conference. SCBWI will hold its first Marketing for Professional Writers intensive on Friday, January 27, 2012 which, along with a Marketing for Illustrators intensive that day, kicks off a jam-packed conference weekend. The Marketing for Writers intensive brings today’s market leaders together to talk trends and marketing tactics in social media, websites, ebooks, mobile & games, apps, book trailers, publicity, working with publishers, Amazon, the education market and more.

The 13th Annual SCBWI International Winter Conference is held January 27-29 at the Grand Hyatt in New York City and brings together publishing professionals, including agents, editors, publishers, and other experts in the field to conduct workshops, panels and presentations for writers and illustrators. It’s a unique networking opportunity designed to help new and published writers and illustrators have their careers soar to the next level.

Registration opens at 10am Pacific Daylight time on October 17th .
Watch for conference announcements and updates at: http://www.scbwi.org and follow us on Twitter #NY12SCBWI and Facebook http://scbwiconference.blogspot.com/.

Book Trailers and Social Media Events

I’ll be speaking about book trailers and social media events.

Available August 15

Drawing on the experience of Random Acts of Publicity, especially the Random Acts of Publicity event on Facebook, we’ll discuss social media for special events. The Random Acts of Publicity saw about 500 people join us in promoting their friend’s books for a week.

Register Now for the Marketing Intensive and the SCBWI Winter Conference

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

2011 Random Acts of Publicity FAQ

• ATTEND the Random Acts of Publicity event on Facebook.
• Read the FAQ.

1. Who can participate?
   Anyone who wants to help a book get noticed by readers. We are focusing on helping a Friend’s book get noticed, but you can also choose to help your favorite book get noticed.
2. What do I do?
   BLLuRT or Post. Or both.
   • BLLuRT (http://bit.ly/RAoP2011). The basic tasks for book marketing online remain the same, BLLuRT! Do one of these each day for your Friend’s book or for your favorite book.
     1. B is for Blog. Blog about a book, the author or anything related.
     2. L is for Link. (http://bit.ly/RAP-Link) Link to something about the book, the author’s page, the book selling page, anything.
     3. L is for LIKE. (http://bit.ly/RAP-Like ) LIKE the book’s Facebook page, the author’s page. Or Add them to your Google+.
     4. R is for Review. (http://bit.ly/RAP-R ) Review a book. Some experts suggest that books tend to break out when they get over 25 reviews on Amazon, GoodReads or other booksites.
     5. T is for Tell or Talk. (http://bit.ly/RAP-T )Tell someone about a book. Your friend, a teacher, a librarian, anyone. Talk about the book—why did you like it? What excited you about this book? Why should I read it?
   • POST. It’s also a great week to post something about book marketing, perhaps a personal experience, a tutorial, a tips sheet or a case study of book marketing. Put the URL of your post in the Random Acts of Publicity Facebook page for others to read
3. What books should I talk about this week?
   Your Friend’s book or your favorite book. We are focusing especially on new books or less well-known books. Focus on a great book that not many readers know about.
4. Can Publishers participate?
   Yes, you can BLLuRT about books, too. We ask that you focus on mid-list or new authors, those who could benefit from a boost during Random Acts of Publicity week. We know it’s your job to BLLuRT about the front-list, that and much more; as an individual working in book publishing, though, we are asking that you champion a dark horse during Random Acts of Publicity Week.

Random Acts of Publicity Week was created by Darcy Pattison (www.darcypattison.com), writing teacher and author of Prairie Storms (www.facebook.com/PrairieStorms) , as a way to help create an atmosphere of fun and collaboration in marketing books. It occurs each September, the four days following Labor Day.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

RANDOM ACTS OF PUBLICITY WEEK

September 6-9, 2011
Facebook Event Page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=247495138609650

It’s all about your Friend’s book.

The 3rd Annual Random Acts of Publicity, September 6-8, 2011 is a week to celebrate your Friend’s book, or your favorite book, by doing a Random Act of Publicity: Blog, link, Like, review, or talk about the book . (BLLuRT it Out!)

Daily posts here on Fiction Notes (www.darcypattison.com) will offer tips, wisdom and Prizes for your Friend!
Twitter: Use #RAP2011

September 6: Guest Susan Raab

“Brand Building Square One” by Susan Raab, President of Raab Associates, www.raabassociates.com.
One-day chance for you to enter your Friend to win one of 15 FREE Giveaways of a 15-minute book marketing consultation provided by Raab Associates.

September 7: Guests Barbara Fisch and Sarah Shealy

Many Hands Make Light Work – or How Two Heads are Better than One by Barbara Fisch and Sarah Shealy, Blue Slip Media, www.blueslipmedia.com
One-day chance for you to enter your Friend to win a 15-minute book marketing consultation provided by Blue Slip Media.

September 8: Guest Deborah Sloan

Create Buzz by Connecting with Readers by Deborah Sloan of Deborah Sloan & Company. www.deborahsloanandcompany.com
One-day chance for you to enter your Friend to win a one-hour book marketing consultation provided by Deborah Sloan & Company.

September 9: Guest Dana Lynn Smith

How to Get Your Book Reviewed by Dana Lynn Smith of The Savvy Book Marketer. www.thesavvybookmarketer.com
One-day chance for you to enter your Friend to win a FREE copy of How to Get Your Book Reviewed by Dana Lynn Smith

ALL WEEK: The Book Trailer Manual

Post your Friend’s name/book title on the Facebook page for Random Acts of Publicity to be entered to win a FREE The Book Trailer Manual by Darcy Pattison. One ebook given away daily; must post Friend’s name that day to be eligible and you can post it each day if you like.

NOTE: You may not enter your own name in any of these prize giveaways. By posting a person’s name you acknowledge that you have asked their permission and the post is with their knowledge. Please note carefully WHERE to comment for each giveaway. They all require you to comment on the POST at Fiction Notes (www.darcypattison.com). The EXCEPTION is the ongoing drawing for The Book Trailer Manual; for this giveaway and this one only, please post on the Random Acts of Publicity Facebook page.

FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions

1. Who can participate?
   Anyone who wants to help a book get noticed by readers. We are focusing on helping a Friend’s book get noticed, but you can also choose to help your favorite book get noticed.
2. What do I do?
   BLLuRT or Post. Or both.
   1. BLLuRT (http://bit.ly/RAoP2011). The basic tasks for book marketing online remain the same, BLLuRT! Do one of these each day for your Friend’s book or for your favorite book.
      • B is for Blog. Blog about a book, the author or anything related.
      • L is for Link. (http://bit.ly/RAP-Link) Link to something about the book, the author’s page, the book selling page, anything.
      • L is for LIKE. (http://bit.ly/RAP-Like ) LIKE the book’s Facebook page, the author’s page. Or Add them to your Google+.
      • R is for Review. (http://bit.ly/RAP-R ) Review a book. Some experts suggest that books tend to break out when they get over 25 reviews on Amazon, GoodReads or other booksites.
      • T is for Tell or Talk. (http://bit.ly/RAP-T )Tell someone about a book. Your friend, a teacher, a librarian, anyone. Talk about the book—why did you like it? What excited you about this book? Why should I read it?
   2. Post. It’s also a great week to post something about book marketing, perhaps a personal experience, a tutorial, a tips sheet. Put the URL of your post in the Random Acts of Publicity Facebook Event Page for others to read.
3. What books should I talk about this week?
   Your Friend’s book or your favorite book. We are focusing especially on new books or less well-known books. Focus on a great book that not many readers know about.
4. Can Publishers participate?
   Yes, you can BLLuRT about books, too. We ask that you focus on mid-list or new authors, those who could benefit from a boost during Random Acts of Publicity week. We know it’s your job to BLLuRT about the front-list, that and much more; as an individual working in book publishing, though, we are asking that you champion a dark horse during Random Acts of Publicity Week.

–

Random Acts of Publicity Week was created by Darcy Pattison (www.darcypattison.com), writing teacher and author of Prairie Storms (www.facebook.com/PrairieStorms) , as a way to help create an atmosphere of fun and collaboration in marketing books. It occurs each September, the four days following Labor Day.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

YA for Dummies and Prairie Storms

What sounds does a ground hog make? An earless lizard? A burrowing owl? Six months ago, I had no idea!

August, 2011 Release

Written by Deborah Halverson, founder of the writer’s advice website DearEditor.com, it has great advice on writing and publishing a teen novel. Deborah edited young adult and children’s fiction with Harcourt Children’s Books before picking up a pen to write the award-winning teen novels Honk If You Hate Me and Big Mouth.

The book is filled with great features, including:

• tips for targeting an audience, finding an angle that’ll make the story stand out, and writing a killer hook
• an extensive chapter on self-marketing to help writers move boldly into the realm of self-promotion–including book trailers
• techniques and exercises to shape plot, create teen-friendly characters, develop a convincingly youthful voice, write natural dialogue, and use setting to illuminate characters and plot
• 13 National Book Award winners and finalists, Newbery medalists and honorees, and other award-winning luminaries sharing their insights
• self-editing tools to transform a first draft into a strong submission-ready final draft
• insider tips for finding the right agent and/or editor and preparing a stand-out submission package
• answers to common book contract questions
• advice on self-publishing for YA writers

Read more at DearEditor.com

Finding Audio for a Book Trailer

To anticipate the release of Prairie Storms and celebrate the release of Writing Young Adult Fiction for Dummies, I’m debuting the Prairie Storms book trailer here today.

As the author of The Book Trailer Manual, I had some simple ideas on where to find public domain sounds and inexpensive audio tracks.

Sound Track. First, I knew that I wanted a sound track to back up the animal sounds. Jeremy Doss, my nephew, is a talented film composer with experience in creating the musical moods needed to accompany and enhance images. A graduate of Film Score program an University of Southern California, he also writes music for video games and other uses.

We talked about what sort of music I needed and Jeremy was fantastic to work with. Contact him at jersam1995@sbcglobal.net

Animal Sounds – FREE. Second, I needed audio of the sounds made by each animal. Any time I need audio or video for animals in the United States, I start at the Fish and Wildlife Multimedia Library. The government agency provides public domain multimedia, free for public use. Here, I found great audio for the American Bison and the Bald Eagle. However, none of the other animals had sound tracks.

Animal Sounds – Inexpensive. My next stop was www.SoundDogs.com, a site which has a wide variety of audio clips. Amazingly, they had every other sound I needed, except the ground hog. For these clips, I looked for short audio clips with clear sounds of the animal involved. You can sort by the length of a clip and I was looking for the shortest possible: I knew I wanted the whole video about one minute in length, so I would only need a 4-5 second sound clip for any one animal. I searched and listened to clips and made decisions. One disappointment was that the earless lizard had no sound; indeed, most lizards don’t make any sounds. I finally decided to go with a clip of a lizard running on wood as the most likely option.

After I put all the sounds into the shopping cart, I was a bit afraid to look at the total. It was a pleasant surprise to see that I had only spent about $20.

Ask Permission from Private Party. Then, there was that pesky ground hog. Fortunately, I found www.hoghaven.com, a site specifically about ground hogs, and they had a dozen sound clips of ground hogs. I wrote the site owner, explained the project and asked permission to use one of the sounds. They were gracious enough to give permission. That gave me the last sound that I needed.

Creating the Book Trailer for Prairie Storms

With Kathleen Rietz’s (www.kathleenrietz.com) watercolor images from the Prairie Storm book and the sounds, I set to work. I use Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum (http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/moviestudiope) to edit my video. No, it’s not a free program like PhotoStory, it has lots of flexibility and options. I searched and searched for a program when I started doing book trailers, until I came to Vegas. Here’s what sold me on this program: they have extensive tutorials right at your fingertips, built into the main screen. The learning curve for this program was minimal compared to anything else I tried, an hour instead of four or five.

To create this trailer, I made some decisions:
The trailer would run about one minute.
With twelve animals that meant about 4 seconds per animal, with the remaining time going to the opening screen and credits.

I set up the program with markers every four seconds and added the images on one track, the animal sounds on a second and the sound track on a third. Then, I went through and added to a fourth track the text that appears on the video. Vegas has the capability to scan across an image or zoom in and out, so I adjusted this. Initially, the images were full page, but the text of the book interfered, so I zoomed in on each animal, then panned across to create movement. Static images are weaker than moving images in a trailer, you lose the viewer’s attention.

After previewing it a number of times and getting feedback, I took my husband’s suggestion to create a bit of a splash at the end with the book cover. After the American Bison at the end, there’s actually a half second of nothing except the music track. This is followed by a thunder clap and the front cover of the book. To find the right thunder clap, I went back to www.SoundDogs.com and searched through their extensive offering of storm sounds.

The video ends quickly with credits to the publisher, Sylvan Dell, the film composer Jeremy Doss and thanks to hoghaven.com for the groundhog sounds.

Working with a publisher, I was careful to run drafts of the video past the editor, publicity director and publisher. Jeremy Doss approved the trailer, as did Kathleen Rietz, the illustrator. When all approvals were in, I uploaded it to YouTube. And waited. It was ready early June, but I knew that I didn’t want to show it until after I spoke at the American Library Association, where the trailer would have its debut. And now, here’s the debut on this site:

*|YouTube:uaUirE0ed6Y|*

TEACHERS: If your school blocks video through your server, please email me (darcy at darcypattison dot com) for a copy of the file to show to your class.

AUTHORS: Need more on how-to create book trailers? See my sister site www.booktrailermanual.com

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Interview with Darcy Pattison about her new book, Prairie Storms (August, 2011, Sylvan Dell Publishing).

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Did you know that the Novel Revision Retreat is available in a book?

In 1999, I started teaching a retreat for beginning to intermediate writers, for those getting encouraging rejections, but could not quite get that acceptance letter. This year, there are four debut novels coming out of those retreats and so far, three more for 2012.

Podcast: Listen to a Conversation about Novel Revision

I recently had a conversation with Bridgette Mongeon (Bri jeet Mon zho), about the workbook for the retreat, Novel Metamorphosis: Uncommon Ways to Revise, including tips for using it with a group. She taped it as a podcast, which is posted today.
Listen to the podcast.

Watch a retreat in progress

This video is from a San Francisco retreat.

Plan a Retreat in Your Area

Novel Revision Retreat in a Book

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

Life has been full! Here are some pics to prove it!

Arkansas Literary Festival

April 8, Literacy on the Lawn, Governor's Mansion

School Visits: Paris Elementary and Cherry Valley Elementary

Teressa, Cherry Valley Elementary Literacy Coach

Oliver K. Woodman Project by Cherry Valley Elementary Students

Paris Elementary Assembly: Reading The Scary Slopes.

After School Quilts

I wish I could show you the kids who made these quilts (privacy issues!). They had a blast. There were five boys and one girl and everyone had a great time. We talked about the history of quilting and they chose to make Amish quilts; I think they liked the black, as much as anything. We met once a week for about 8 weeks to finish these projects.

Amish Quilts made by 10 year olds.

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win

At the recent conference for the Arkansas Association of Instructional Media, I did a session on book trailers for use in the library. As part of that session, I asked librarians to participate in making a video. Those interested in become a YouTube star answered this simple question:
What do you do when you get lost?

Here’s the video:

*|YouTube:1NZmSXuxynA|*

Great fun!

Goodreads Book Giveaway

Wisdom, the Midway Albatross

by Darcy Pattison

Giveaway ends March 11, 2012.

See the giveaway details at Goodreads.

Enter to win